Call Me Ishmael

During the Cold War, we had brilliant and popular spy thrillers like John Le Carré’s masterpieces to help explain our perilous and ever-changing world. Why didn’t the genre play a similar part during the war on terror? In this episode of Call Me Ishmael, Peter Theroux—former CIA agent, scion of one of America’s most celebrated literary families, and a leading translator of Arabic literature—addresses this question and discusses the evolution of the spy novel and the role it played in shaping American culture and politics.

Ross Macdonald was one of America’s greatest writers of crime fiction, giving us a series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and starring the now-iconic private detective Lew Archer. But Macdonald never really existed: He was the creation of a brilliant liteary critic named Ken Millar, who used the pseudonym to explore post-war America and the demons that plagued it. In this episode of Call Me Ishmael, the novelist and screenwriter Roger Simon, who knew Millar, talks about American noir, why we love our hardened detectives so much, and Macondald’s great masterpiece, The Chill.

Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, GA in 1900, and published only one novel before she died at the age of 49: Gone With the Wind. It won the National Book Award for fiction as well as the Pulitzer Prize, and it was soon adapted into Hollywood's best-loved classics. In this episode of Call Me Ishmael, Lee Harris—novelist, critic, and a Southerner whose ancestors straddled the war's great divide— talks about the role literature played, and continues to play, in understanding the Civil War, about how the war and the novels that depicted it shaped American history, and about what happened to those people who had found themselves on the wrong side of that history after losing everything.

Call Me Ishmael is a show about the power of American words. Together with guests like Senator Ted Cruz, novelist and screenwriter Roger L. Simon, historian Lee Harris, and Former CIA super spy Peter Theroux, Lee Smith will revisit the words—in books, movies, and songs—that have shaped and determined our sense of ourselves and our nation, forging both our private ambitions and our collective sensibility.